Girl Like Me

Guys are afraid of girls; it’s weird to admit but most of us haven’t come a long way from the seventh grade when we had our friends push us into the popular girls so we could cop a feel. In fact, this fear has been part of men as long as we’ve been Homo sapiens, and so as long as we’ve been making gay jokes. Think about it: A caveman wouldn’t club anything over the head that he wasn’t going to eat unless it warranted at least a fraction of his fear.
But thanks to people like Betty Friedan, we now have laws that keep us from clubbing girls, at least outside Alabama. Today, since our outlet for fear has been redirected from fight, flight is the reason we spend Friday nights femaleless and with a penis in our hand—unless it’s another penis, which is a different reason entirely.

Even a confident guy, when put in a situation with social pressure i.e. boobs, will act as though he is doing everything he possibly can to keep the girl from laughing at him. Well, the truth is that girls will laugh at you no matter what you do, so you might as well give them something good to laugh at. But before we can achieve this level of openness, we must first evolve beyond our pubescent selves so we can maybe cop a feel on the same girl more than once.

Our hobbies and careers may keep us from social interactions that end in fulfilling social interactions. But let’s be honest, rationalized solitude can also be a creative way to avoid facing your fear of the opposite sex. Engine rebuilds, screenplay rewrites, and alphabetizing your anti-depressants are great ways to curb itches that you cannot curb by itching alone, but distraction isn’t just the purpose of tread in Dante’s City of the Dead.

Even in our most practical hour, we might have thought of lucrative ways to divert attention during dry spells that make the Sahara look like a vagina at a Bon Jovi concert. Money, however, is usually destructive for bachelors unless their fun is tethered by alimony payments.

Of course, it makes sense to fear some things—like say, injuring your penis, which is why we take an awkwardly long time zipping up our pants while sans underwear.

But there’s no reason to have girl fear because girls are harmless, at least if you’re single. I mean, I’d be afraid of the Dalai Lama if we shared a checking account, but dragging around female baggage when you have no female is like worrying about boat repairs when you can’t even afford a car.

(I know that many of us think we were conditioned by our mothers, teachers, and Hillary Clinton’s haircut to fear women, but I’m here to tell you that this rationalization is only a stone’s throw from becoming gay.)

Anyway, you’ve had a girlfriend, if not a sister, and if not you’ve at least seen Gilmore Girls, so you know that girls—though they’re totally fun and irreplaceable—are stupid. And stupid things, like Alexis Bledel’s acting, may cause you to cringe, but definitely not shut down in fear.

The best way to weld this point to your subconscious is to understand girls, and since To Kill a Mockingbird taught us that you don’t really know how stupid somebody is until you’ve walked around in their shoes, then the best way to understand girls without developing a bunion is to be hungover.

By being hungover, we temporarily experience a state of lowered testosterone levels—that is, we feel how girls feel all the time. Birth control can also do the trick, but you’re probably not rich enough to get away with looking like Jonah Hill.

As we know, hangover symptoms include constant anxiety and vulnerability caused by the absence of awesomeness running through your veins. For example, last time I was hungover, while unloading a colon full of slim jims, I thought my heart was going to stop. Of course, I had no good reason to think this, but like all chicks, I had no ability to curb my spiraling ruminations that result in a panic attack. It’s no wonder why, when we go into work hungover, we constantly need to play the “keep it together, dude” tapes in our head. And it’s no wonder why more than 95 percent of anxiety and depressive disorders come from girls—and guys who look like Clay Aiken.

So it’s safe to say that girls feel all the time how we feel when we’re hungover, probably much worse.

It’s why they ruin their credit over shoes that ruin their feet; it’s why they buy inbred dogs and give them inbred names, and it’s why they only make good leaders after undergoing some sort of testosterone therapy, which makes them want to style their hair off of an actor in a McDonald’s commercial circa 1985.

In fact, nature only created beings with low testosterone levels for one reason: making babies. Other than this, an estrogen-dominated endocrine system is worse than pointless. Even physicians are now treating menopause with testosterone instead of estrogen, which has been a boon for Motley Crüe album sales in Florida.

It’s scary to think that half the people on earth go their entire life in this state of imbalance. And when your tequila chugging contest induces food sweats the next day, you can really start to empathize with the fairer sex and begin to feel feelings that you may have never felt before. You’ll feel sorry, you’ll feel gratitude, and you will feel less lame as your fear of girls decreases to at least a manageable level.

This knowledge won’t make you more confident, but it’s something to keep in mind as you rise up from your lair of dirty dishes, inside-out socks, and Big Mac wrappers. Once you put your fear into perspective and talk to a few girls, you’ll realize that not only are they not scary, they’re actually nice people, and you may even begin to respect them for keeping it surprisingly together for how bonkers they must feel.